The present invention relates to arrangements for handling cassettes in general, and more particularly to an arrangement for loading and unloading X-ray film cassettes.
There are already known various constructions of arrangements for unloading and loading X-ray film cassettes. Such arrangements usually include a cassette-handling station at which the respective cassette is handled in a light-tight manner, this station including means for opening and closing the cassette. These arrangements conventionally further include means for withdrawing the films from the cassettes present at the cassette-handling station and for introducing new films into the cassettes, also at the cassette-handling station, while the respective cassette is open, a plurality of input channels serving to accommodate respective storage receptacles which respectively contain stacks of films of different sizes, the same number of devices for singularizing and individually removing the films from the respective stacks in the respective storage receptacles, a first transporting device for transporting the individual films removed from the respective stacks in the respective storage receptacles to the cassette-handling station, and a second transporting device for conveying the films removed from the respective cassettes out of the cassette-handling station.
The loading and unloading arrangements of the above-described type are suited to perform cassette-unloading and cassette-loading operations in daylight or artificial light, that is, outside of a darkroom. An arrangement of this type is known, for instance, from the published German patent application DE-OS No. 26 07 876. An important disadvantage of this conventional construction is to be seen in the fact that it is designed for handling films of only a few pre-selected sizes, and that the number of different film sizes which can be handled by the arrangement is predetermined. Considering the huge number of different sizes of films currently used in X-ray diagnostics, the five different film sizes which this conventional arrangement is capable of handling is insufficient. Yet, an expansion of the arrangement to make it capable of handling more than five different film sizes is impossible in this conventionally constructed arrangement, particularly for structural reasons and space considerations. Finally, the capital investment which, with such a complicated machine, necessarily must be relatively high, is too high when the limited possibilities of use (low number of film sizes which can be handled thereby) are taken into consideration.